Where Most Retail VoC Programs Fail

Part 3 of a 4 part blog series.

Part 1: Retail customer feedback: why timing is everything
Part 2: The customer-centric retail era and what it means for vendors

Facing a retail customer who is both hyper-informed and highly conversational, today’s retailer relies on a VoC program to serve up the actionable bits of customer feedback that it so desperately needs. Unfortunately, that is where things often fall apart.

Most retail VoC programs that exist today excel at collecting and reporting on data. These applications do a wonderful job of capturing, aggregating, and reporting on customer experience data, and some are even accompanied by real human analytical muscle, which enables deep and complex interpretational inferences and conclusions.

But as strong as they are at capturing and reporting, most VoC applications fail when it comes to operationalizing that data and using it to transform their existing processes. Quite simply, they perform poorly when it comes to the mission critical task of funneling pressing feedback back to the right people within an organization and empowering those people to act rapidly to resolve store-level pain points.

Perhaps this is why voice of the customer programs often fail to change company processes in a real and meaningful ways, particularly at larger companies. Indeed, research has suggested that voice of the customer programs rarely achieve their promised transformational effect and that the bulk of corporate customer experience efforts end up languishing at relatively low levels of maturity.

Customer feedback is not unlike a highly radioactive element; it is something whose value decays incredibly quickly if it is not auctioned in close proximity to the actual experience. No matter how visually appealing the reporting engine, no matter how profound and insightful the deep dive analysis, and no matter how elaborate the modeling and statistical gymnastics, customer feedback programs prove their value if, and only if, they can deliver timely and actionable feedback to the right people. Regrettably, vendors often lose sight of this all-important fact when they engineer their solutions.

By subsuming customer feedback into standardized temporal buckets within their reporting tools (weeks, months, quarters), they lessen the impact of the data by dissociating it from the moment of experience. And, by constructing dashboards and scorecards aimed clearly at head office or corporate personnel, the vendors ensure that the data bypasses store-level staff—the very people who are poised to act at the moment of experience.